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Hacker News Hacker News1. The French government announces its digital agency is to write a plan, by the end of the year, so that France could reduce its extra-European dependencies. The communiqué is wrapped up with minor facts (e.g. the digital agency is to switch to Linux on dozens of computers) and big promises from Ministers.
2. Various news sites state that "France is ditching Windows", at least in their titles.
3. On new aggregators, most people react to the titles. Some do read the articles. Very few realize it's about promises to act toward a vague goal, with an unknown calendar, and many political uncertainties.
I would have hoped for more cautious reactions. It's not a leading act, not a reason to be proud, not a example to follow. It's just words.
The French government already made similar promises in the past. Sometimes, it did happen, like the Gendarmerie (rural police) switching to a Linux distribution. Sometimes, it didn't, like the pact signed by the Army Ministry with Microsoft in 2022: many clauses are still secret, even the prices.
I just hope we end up having more wins at the EU-level, instead of massive fails like GAIA-X...
HN is not Reddit, and that's a Reddit pattern. It's an anti-intellectual pattern because it's a popularity/anger contest and there's nothing of substance.
I'd love to hear the pros and cons and even likelihood of Linux in government, but I'm having trouble finding the smart commentary from the grey noise.
Help!
We also migrated from AWS and Azure to European cloud.
But as you can see Mac is still from the USA so although the making things European sounds nice, it's only part of the reason.
Mac has greatly improved with the M chip line. Windows has greatly degraded over time.
AWS and Azure are by now something like 10x the price per year of just buying the hardware yourselves. They always compare the price to the salary of a senior engineer in San Francisco if you include vested stocks.
However installing a database with the correct security settings has also become a lot easier since AWS started.
There are roughly 80,000 more systems currently in transition at varying levels of complete.
Yes, this new directive is to move towards a goal of 2.5M systems. Yes, that's a lot more than their current number. They are making progress and now have a clear directive that guides them.
Microsoft has all but abandoned their self hosted products in favour of cloud, and their cloud services are a security dumpster fire.
Microsoft’s cloud was described as a “pile of shit” but it achieved FedRAMP ATO only because so many agencies were already using their services.
https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...
Entra ID is full of disastrous design-level bugs like this one.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/19/microsoft_entra_id_bu...
Microsoft has deep rooted cultural problems that make the company structurally incapable of fixing their platform.
https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
[dupe]
As a bit of an old-timer, I literally don't know exactly where to start a new conversation on this in a place like this; for me the obviousness of the theoretical and practical superiority of free and open source software principles are just always there for me; and it's quite obvious here that it's different for younger people.
So I'm dropping the names and the concepts. Perhaps someone else knows how to get this going?
Interestingly, when it comes to replacing Windows with Linux — at least on the government side — China is absolutely leading the pack. The "Xinchuang" (信创) initiative, focused on domestic tech self-reliance, has been underway for several years now. The vast majority of new government machines run domestically-branded OSes that are essentially reskinned Linux distros, some even powered by Chinese-made x86 CPUs and GPUs. This has had the indirect effect of substantially improving China's Linux desktop software ecosystem — to maintain compatibility with these "domestic" systems, many mainstream desktop apps have been rewritten on modern cross-platform stacks (read: Electron-style web wrappers).
They don't even use vanilla MySQL/PostgreSQL, and closed-source options like Oracle or SQL Server are a hard no. Instead, they use heavily forked "Xinchuang" variants of PostgreSQL. This entire tech stack is essentially a prerequisite for anyone looking to land government contracts.
There's literally no non-American general-purpose operating system.
Astroturfing around this is getting suspicious.
Over time, more and more work is going to be done by AI though. At some point, it will be unthinkably slow and expensive to let humans work on anything.
To do *that* locally, you need GPUs and LLMs.
How will Europe solve these two?